Complete civil packages for battery energy storage near Hempstead, NY: pad subgrade and mass grading, foundation excavation, access and crane pads, collection trenching, ductbank, SWPPP, and substation civil.
Backwell contracts complete civil site work packages for battery energy storage developers and EPCs building near Hempstead in Nassau County, New York. One contract covers site preparation through final stabilization, with Backwell field leadership on site.
The Town of Hempstead is the largest municipality in Nassau and voted unanimously for a one year moratorium on battery storage facilities in February 2025, since extended to August 2026. Heavy haul moves on the Southern State Parkway corridor by way of truck legal routes including Sunrise Highway, Hempstead Turnpike and the Meadowbrook State Parkway service roads, with the Long Island Rail Road running through Hempstead and Rockville Centre. The town spans outwash plain in Riverhead and Haven soils inland and tidal marsh and made land along the south shore bays, so groundwater depth varies sharply within a few miles.
Publicly reported battery energy storage in and around Nassau County:
Project details come from public filings and reporting and are listed to show where the work is. Backwell is not affiliated with these projects or their developers.
Nassau lies on the same coastal plain sequence as Suffolk and is mapped in the joint Nassau and Suffolk soil survey. The Harbor Hill moraine forms the north shore spine, with steep bluffs, kettles and irregular grades from Glen Cove east through Oyster Bay, while the land south of the moraine is a gently sloping outwash plain that flattens into tidal marsh at Freeport, Hempstead and the south shore bays. Dominant series are Riverhead sandy loam, Haven loam and Plymouth loamy sand on the plain, with Hempstead loam mapped historically in the central county and tidal marsh and made land along the bays. These are deep, rapidly permeable sands and gravels. There is no shallow bedrock. Groundwater in the upper glacial aquifer is close to grade across the south shore and well below grade on the moraine. Redevelopment parcels throughout the county carry urban fill of unknown makeup over the natural profile.
In Nassau the site itself is the constraint more than the soil. Parcels are small, surrounded by live utilities, and rarely offer laydown, so pad excavation, spoil handling and aggregate delivery need staged trucking rather than stockpiling. Expect to remove and replace existing pavement sections and to encounter uncharacterized urban fill above the native sand, which means characterization before export and separate handling for anything that fails clean fill criteria. Enclosure pads on the outwash plain sit on good bearing sand once the fill is cut out, but the bearing layer may be several feet down. On south shore parcels the water table is shallow enough that footing excavations, duct banks and grounding grids will need dewatering with discharge controls. Stormwater practice defaults to infiltration, so test pits and seasonal high groundwater determinations govern basin bottom elevations and pad grades.
Full detail on the Nassau County market is on the Nassau County battery storage civil page.
Concrete is placed by our subcontractor partners under the same contract, so the foundations follow the earthwork without a separate award. We price the civil package as one scope under one contract, which gives the EPC a single point of responsibility for the civil critical path instead of managing separate clearing, earthwork, and underground subcontracts.
Battery storage in New York is governed by Section 1207 of the 2025 Fire Code of New York State, which the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council adopted on July 25, 2025 with an effective date of December 31, 2025. Section 1207 carries material based on the 2023 edition of NFPA 855 and renumbers what the 2020 code placed at Section 1206. Systems must be listed to UL 9540. Large scale fire testing under UL 9540A, reported to and approved by the fire code official, is what permits reduced separation distances and quantities above the table limits, and a hazard mitigation analysis is required to exceed the maximum allowable quantity. Outdoor installations carry a ten foot clearance to lot lines, public ways, buildings, stored combustibles, and other exposure hazards, with ten feet of combustible vegetation cleared on each side. New York added a mandatory peer review at Section 1207.12 for systems above the Table 1207.5 quantities, covering the site plan, the emergency operations plan, and the UL 9540A report. Those provisions fix pad layout and access road geometry before any earthwork is priced.
Battery storage siting in New York runs on the Fire Code of New York State, which adopts the International Fire Code provisions for stationary energy storage, together with NFPA 855 and the UL 9540A test reporting the authority having jurisdiction will ask for. The civil consequences are set early and they are ours to build.
We build to the approved civil drawings and the fire code commentary that comes with the permit. We do not stamp the design.
Local law. As of September 2026 Nassau carries four active moratoriums. Hempstead's is extended to August 2026, Oyster Bay's to April 2027, Glen Cove's to May 2027, and North Hempstead adopted a one year moratorium in December 2024. Oyster Bay and Glen Cove restrictions are aimed at utility scale systems.
Backwell superintendents, project managers, and lead operators run every site. We mobilize company equipment for the core scope and scale each project with leased production fleets, qualified regional subcontractors, and agency-placed field staff, all under Backwell supervision and a single contract.
Contractor licensing. New York does not issue a statewide general contractor license for commercial construction. Licensing is handled locally, so individual cities, towns, and counties may require contractor registration or a local license, and a few trades are licensed at the state level, including asbestos handling and crane operation. Separately, contractors and subcontractors performing public work, and work covered by Article 8 of the Labor Law, must be registered with the New York State Department of Labor under its statewide contractor registry, which took effect December 30, 2024. Owners, EPCs, and integrators on battery storage projects will typically ask for that DOL registration number along with insurance and, where required, bonding.
Construction stormwater. SPDES General Permit for Stormwater Discharges from Construction Activity, permit number GP-0-25-001, issued by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. It took effect January 29, 2025, replacing GP-0-20-001, and runs through January 28, 2030. Coverage is triggered at one acre of soil disturbance, or less if part of a larger common plan, and requires a Notice of Intent plus a SWPPP prepared and implemented under the DEC design manual. Coverage under the prior permit did not carry over automatically, so active sites had to refile. Backwell carries the SWPPP scope, installs and maintains the controls, keeps the inspection log, and closes the permit out with final stabilization.
Prevailing wage. Standalone battery storage sits outside New York Labor Law Section 224-d. That section applies to a covered renewable energy system as defined in Public Service Law Section 66-p, and that definition lists generating technologies only, so energy storage is not included and Section 224-d contains no storage clause. Prevailing wage still reaches many storage projects by other routes. Labor Law Section 224-a expressly excludes an energy storage system with a capacity equal to or under five megawatts alternating current, which means a larger storage system on a privately contracted project that meets the public funds and cost tests can be covered. The Public Service Commission order of June 20, 2024 establishing the updated energy storage goal states that projects of one megawatt alternating current and larger will be subject to prevailing wage requirements, so incentivized projects carry it as a program condition rather than by statute. Storage co-located with a covered renewable generator follows that generator. Separately, contractors and subcontractors performing public work, and work covered by Article 8 of the Labor Law, must be registered with the New York State Department of Labor under the statewide contractor registry effective December 30, 2024. The applicable trigger should be confirmed project by project. Backwell produces certified payroll, pays the applicable wage determination, and supports apprenticeship labor-hour compliance.
All New York battery storage civil work or the New York solar civil cluster.
Send plans, a scope of work, and the schedule through the form below or call (315) 400-2654. We review the civil package, walk the site if it is at that stage, and return a scoped proposal with a schedule of values, stated fill allowances, and unit rates for overages. A one-page capability statement is available for prequalification files.
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